The big risk the liberal establishment took in advancing Obama for President was not in proposing a black candidate, but in nominating an incompetent one. That ensured that when the recriminations came it would be about race.
A successful Obama presidency would have been a breakthrough for race relations that would have lasted decades. Conversely, a catastrophic Obama presidency would set things back for generations.
The unspoken takeaway for many would be “never an African-American again”. But that is the wrong lesson. The right lesson, I think should be “never an incompetent again”.
Things might not have been much better, and arguably they would have been worse, under Hillary Clinton. The kind of disaster that is unfolding is across the board. Foreign policy catastrophe, economic mismanagement, chaos in governance, botched programs — they’re just piling up. So in the face that avalanche of woes, Obama will do the easiest thing: make it about race.
But it is really not about race. Race in this case was cosmetic. It was the mask the liberal establishment donned to rejuvenate their tired old agenda. And now that it’s failing comprehensively they’ll blame the mask.
It may seem counterintuitive, but the ones with the most to gain by racializing Obama are faceless backroom boys. They know he’s done for so they’re going to pin the disaster on the black guy, not upon the guys who selected the incompetent who happened to black. They’ll put their political mistakes in the coffin with Obama’s career. Pin it on him and push Hillary 2016.
Month: July 2013
The Moral Pendulum, The Political Pendulum: Upswings Happen
One of the things we mention in America 3.0 “that distinctively conservative type of pessimism that seems almost to enjoy the prospect of an apocalyptic end to all that is good and true in the world,” and the “doom and gloom” purveyed by many Conservative and even Libertarian thinkers.
We are brash enough to claim that we know better, and that there is a hopeful future for America. The quote at the beginning of our book has many meanings:
Nobody knows
what kind of trouble we’re in.
Nobody seems to think
it all might happen again.
Gram Parsons
“One Hundred Years From Now” (1968)
One meaning is that the authors of America 3.0 have some idea of what kind of trouble we’re in. We also have reason to think “it all might happen again,” meaning that America will reinvent itself and have a new age of freedom and prosperity.
This is especially true of my friends who are religious or cultural conservatives. All too often, they seem to believe that the United States is doomed, and deserves to be. This is odd for people who are religious, and who should know that God’s capacity to intervene in history is no less than it has ever been.
As we have been speaking about the book in the few weeks since it was published, we have found that people want to have hope. They say things like, “oh, God, I hope you are right.” Others are almost offended, demanding that we admit that the country is finished, and that we are mental cripples for thinking otherwise. If the American story is going to have great new chapters, but we have to make them happen, no one can sink into a warm bath of despair and slip beneath the surface, gurgling “I told you so!” Everyone is going to have to get ready to live through “interesting times,” in the Chinese sense, and participate in a contentious and difficult new Founding Era. If you are already tired, that seems like a lot to ask! But time waits for no one, we don’t get to pick which decades we will live in, and God Almighty knows better than we do what we are capable of and what should be demanded of us!
Many people seem to be in the grip of the historical fallacy that the future can be predicted by making straight-line predictions based on existing trends. But this is wrong. There are trends, which provoke counter-trends. There are movements that provoke resistance and reversal. There are declines that provoke reconstruction.
In particular, the moral tenor of society, which we do not say much about in the book, can change, and will change.
Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alterations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it.
Sir Charles Petrie, The Victorians
Epigraph from The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
The Diamond Age is a major influence on America 3.0. In it, among its many riches, is a depiction of a society that arises on the wreckage of our current world.
The restoration of America, at every level, is up to us. Economics and politics, the focus of our book, are hard. Moral and spiritual restoration, which are beyond the ambit of our book, are even harder.
But remember: If something can’t go on, it won’t.
Be happy. And look for opportunities to get to work on building America 3.0.
History Friday – In the Shadow of a Mountain Meadow
Considering all those cinematic or literary occasions in which an emigrant wagon train on the California/Oregon trail was pictured being attacked by a war-party of Indians, it actually happened as represented on very few occasions. That is, a defensive circle of wagons, with the pioneers being well-dug in while the Indians ride around on horseback, whooping and shouting to beat the band, and firing volleys of arrows at them. A little disconcerting for the fan of traditional Wild Westerns to find this out; kind of like discovering that most cowboys didn’t have much actual use for a six-shooter, and that most western towns were actually rather refreshingly law-abiding places. It ruins a whole lot of plots, knowing of these inconvenient verities, but those historians who become passionately interested in the stories of the trail, the frontier, the cattle baronies; they are not terribly surprised. As with everything, the more one looks… the more nuance appears. Of such are books made, non and fiction alike.
Why does this image reoccur, in the face of considerable scholarship to the contrary? Besides the inherent drama in the stories of the westering pioneers and gold-rushers and the desire of those later telling the stories to heighten the drama, probably the biggest reason may be that those who took part in the great transcontinental migrations actually anticipated something of the sort. They had two centuries of bitter history to draw upon, of grudges, warfare, and atrocities on both sides. Of two cultures colliding, of ancient grudges breaking into fresh enmity; why would it be any different west of the Mississippi than it had been east of it?
Amazingly enough, for at least two decades, until well after the Civil War, wagon-train pioneers actually encountered little open hostility from those various tribes whose territories they passed through. Not of the open sort described above, anyway. There was a certain amount of petty thievery, of oxen, horses, and mules stolen or strayed at night, sniping from the badlands along the Humboldt River, and sometimes single wagons and small parties of travelers beset, robbed, or murdered at any point along the way. There are any number of reasons for this, some of them overlapping. In the early years, there were actually relatively few wagon parties venturing over the trail during the course of the trail season. They were transitory, well-armed and usually well led, and had no desire to pick a fight with warrior-tribes like the Sioux, the horse-lords of the upper plains. Other tribes along the route took the opportunity to do business with the wagon-train parties, either trading commodities or labor in helping them to cross rivers, and as historian George Steward pointed out, it must have gotten pretty darned boring in the winter camps in the Rockies and the upper plains. A new set of travelers passing through their lands offered an interruption to the same old routine.
History Friday: MacArthur’s Mission X
I have stated in an earlier Chicago Boyz column that:
“One of the maddening things about researching General Douglas MacArthur’s fighting style in WW2 was the way he created, used and discarded military institutions, both logistical and intelligence, in the course of his South West Pacific Area (SWPA) operations. Institutions that had little wartime publicity and have no direct organizational descendent to tell their stories in the modern American military.”
Today’s column is the story of one of those “throw away” logistical institutions, one that started as MacArthur’s “Mission X”, what became the small boats and coastal freighter fleet that served MacArthur from 1942 through 1947 as Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP) in post-war Japan.
A Liberty ship and two captured Japanese sampans discharge and load cargo at an unnamed advanced base.
Small Boats and Coastal Freighters
General Douglas MacArthur had three more or less distinct types of coastal shipping pools operating with the World War II (WW2) Southwest Pacific Area (SPWA) theater’s 7th Fleet:
1) Large vessels that were US Army or War Shipping Administration vessels assigned to Army including Dutch East Indies tramp steamers and Vichie French vessels (along with freighters commandeered by MacArthur as floating storage when they arrived with intentions of return). These were the Army Transport Service (ATS) vessels that were, under a 1941 reorganization, integrated into the Water Division of the US Army Transportation Corps. They were manned by American and; Australian merchant seamen in part, but primarily by the US Coast Guard on newer ship after mid-1944.
.2) The small ships and boats section with watercraft of less than 1,000 tons displacement, almost exclusively of local SWPA origin with some built for the U.S. Army in Australia’s small boatyards, that were essential for operating in the coral filled waters of Northern Australia, the Coral Sea, Papua/New Guinea and the scattered islands of the Philippines. They were crewed primarily by a mix of citizens from Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, some as young as 15-years old after February 1943, due to a world wide merchant seaman shortage.
.3) The US Army Engineer Special Brigades (ESB) in LCVP and LCM landing craft. Each US Army Engineer Special Brigade — and MacArthur had three in the Philippines, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Brigades — was equipped to transport and land a division in a “Shore to shore” operation of under 135 miles. (which was the practical maximum overnight range of a LCM combat loaded with a M4 Sherman tank.) These brigades required a force of 7340 men, 540 LCMs and LCVPs, and 104 command and support boats to move that division. You can find an excellent site dedicated to the ESB’s here — http://ebsr.net/ESBhistory.htm
Of the three coastal shipping pools, the second was the only one MacArthur had for the first 18 months after he came to Australia. It was made up primarily of anything the Australians would let “Mission X”, what later became the US Army Small Ship Service (USASS), impress from Australian harbors. Two and three mast sailing ships, tugs, fishing boats and 40 year old coal powered tramp steamers less than 1,000 tons fit to be hulks were the main components of that fleet.
This small boat “fleet” operated in the face of Japanese air superiority without even Destroyers for escort — the USN did not allow any US Navy warships past Milne Bay. If these small watercraft had escorts, they were Australian motor launches, US Navy PT-Boats and US Army ESB landing craft gunboats.
The ghost of database past
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Article I, Section 2, U.S. Constitution:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers
, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
For working on the paternal genealogy of Howard Ira Milligan, my mother’s father, U.S. Census records have proved to be an important primary source.